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The word for world is forest — Ghosts in the machine

Chapter · January 2009

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-211-78891-2_21

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Alan Dunning1 and Paul Woodrow2
1
Alberta College of Art + Design, Calgary, Alberta Canada
2
University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

www.bodydegreezero.org

The word for world is forest – ghosts in the machine

In LeGuin’s novel The Word for World is Forest 1 she presents a fictional forest that serves as a collective mind for
its inhabitants living somewhere between dream time and world time. In the Einstein’s Brain Project the idea of the
forest has come not only to suggest a model for the brain, but also to provide a rich environment for the
exploration of ideas about consciousness and representation.

Imagine a traveller stepping into a forest – he is surrounded on all sides by dense undergrowth, and old growth
trees on the verge of collapse. The build up of organic material on the forest floor is meters thick and passage is
difficult and slow. Many varieties of bright green plants thrust upwards through the spongy blanket. Swellings and
the heavings suggest the imminent and urgent emergence of new growth. The traveller stumbles upon a clearing.
Surrounding the clearing are large numbers of vigorous saplings, their leaves intertwined, framing paths radiating
out in all directions.

To the left of each path is a sign post. From a distance each looks blank. On closer inspection the signs show
illuminated words, apparently indicating what lies along each path. But the words are replaced with other words,
changing so rapidly that it is difficult to separate them from each other. As the words appear and disappear faster
and faster, the traveller is aware only of words in the actual process of coming into view, in the process of
becoming, neither one thing or another, at the very threshold hold of perception, at the threshold of meaning.

One path is as good as another. The traveller sets off along the nearest. The path bends and turns in such a way as to
never quite fully reveal what lies ahead. The traveller fixes on a navigation marker, only to find it constantly
disappearing and reappearing, flickering through the trees, each time it is occluded, to emerge remade and re-
contextualized.

The path opens onto a glade. The traveller is struck by the familiarity of the scene. He has been here before and he
moves confidently into its centre. Yet the scene is not entirely as he remembered. A discrepant memory, what was
just moments ago so familiar suddenly gives way to disorientation in the presence of something alien and strange.

He approaches a tree towards the rear of the glade. It is composed of flickering, points of light. A tiny star shaped
creature wriggles its way towards the luminous fruits of the tree. The creature consumes a tiny specular morsel and
disappears in a pulse of crimson light.

Something catches the eye of the traveler. It is a nest low down in the branches of the tree. It is of immense
complexity, woven from a substance that shimmers in the filtered light. A fantastic brocade, the nest is struck
through with all manner of unidentifiable biomorphic crystals, silks and beads – an entire world within a world. The
traveller looks closely – but the nest defies inspection, breaking up into brilliantly colored ectoblastic blobs, that
cluster and disperse in a glittering looping dance between noise and pattern.

A path leads down to some dunes, and beyond them to a sandy beach. The beach is, in turns, revealed and hidden
by the surf that runs high up the sloping sand. As each wave breaks and washes across the sand, small rivers of
water are formed and reluctantly return the water to the ocean. Each of these rivers cuts deep into the shifting sand –
revealing a network of intersecting incandescent roots.

The roots are warm to the touch and hum softly. The traveller tugs on the roots, pulling them up through the soft
sand, and back to their origin at the trees that fill the interstice between forest and beach. As the roots reach their
parent trees they granularize and explode into fine dust, settling on the beach and reconfiguring themselves into new
roots that sink slowly into the sand. The traveller feels a new rhythmic hum resonate throughout his body.
Freed from their roots, the trees arch back towards the forest before growing rapidly upwards towards the sky where
they form a dense canopy of leaves that are instantly let loose, and tumble to the ground. The sound of these leaves,
individually infinitesimal, in concert, form a wash of white noise that echoes the breaking of the sea. Out of the
noise merges fragments of sound – voices perhaps. A speaking in tongues. Phrases of hope and despair. Nonsense
rhymes and riddles.

As the voices continue they become more and more distinct, but harder to comprehend as they increase
exponentially and mingle in new combinations and languages. The voices pulse rhythmically in and out of phase
reaching a crescendo that ends suddenly as the leaves disperse like a startled flock of birds blocking out the sky.

The sky clears, fluffy white clouds scud across the infinite blue expanse. Slowly the clouds form familiar images – a
rabbit, a planet, a face, a broken arrow. As they drift and tumble, driven upwards by powerful convection, the clouds
form new and surprising forms. Always on the verge of being something describable, the clouds are remade with
such rapidity that they never quite coalesce into anything recognizable or expressible. Beyond language the shapes
hint at a world that is always in the process of becoming, but never fixed, never formed.

The clouds darken and fill the sky. They boil and churn, heralding an approaching storm. Heavy rain falls and pits
the sand. Small craters create random patterns in the sand. The traveller runs towards the shelter of the forest.
Looking up towards the canopy he sees the bright green of tree fronds against a grey sky, dissecting it into shards of
fractured slate.

The traveller moves further into the forest. It is drier here. There are areas protected from the elements by dense
ferns and foliage. The traveler sits, dry and protected. The ground beneath him is soft and spongy. He plunges his
hand into it expecting to feel hard rock or compacted soil beneath the mossy surface, but is surprised to find only
more of the soft and spongy material. He thrusts his face past the mossy interface and into the material, to see the
moss as a transparent medium in which are suspended millions of tiny, phosphorescent, cellular forms of every
imaginable variety, flashing in random sequences as they spin erratically in a diffuse green light. The traveller
reaches for them, as one would take hold a of handful of sand. The cells trickle through his hand falling into the
green expanse, disturbing the medium, forming eddies and vortices. As the eddies grow in size they pull more and
more of the surrounding images into their centre to form treacherous whirlpools. One water funnel, larger than the
others, begins to affect the others, distorting them and pulling them all at once into its centre, until there remains
only the one funnel, a swirling, glittering tower of cells, moving so fast that none is individually distinguishable. The
funnel turns in on itself forming a Klein bottle. Finally the funnel consumes itself and the traveller is alone.

With no points of reference the traveler is unsure whether he is stationary, falling or rising. The traveler feels no
separation between him and the surroundings. Enraptured, he feels himself expanding until there is only his body as
his world. A sudden bifurcation mirrors his body. Rapid fission creates untold numbers of mirrored bodies in an
instance. The bodies stretch as far as the eye can see in all directions. Randomly oriented and located without
seeming pattern, the bodies slowly clump together to mirror the original, fragments – a holographic body reflected
throughout a fractured body universe.

A sudden sensation of falling and the beach rushes up to meet the traveler. The waves break, the wind rustles the
leaves on the trees beyond the dunes. A path leads away from the beach towards a the forest that lies beyond.

The traveler steps into the forest – he is surrounded on all sides by dense undergrowth, and old growth trees on the
verge of collapse…

Ghosts in the Machine

Central to any examination of perception amongst modern societies in which technology plays a major role in the
dissemination of data and images, is the identification and acknowledgement of those behaviours and processes
which are potentially transformative. Within the context of the technology of computer operations Katherine Hayles2
has specified two types of mediated interacting languages: human-only language and computer codes. She goes on
to suggest that computer codes effect the non linguistic realm - linking this to Nigel Thrift’s notion of a
technological unconscious.3
Hayles modifies Thrift’s terminology to explore the difference between human language, which have self
awareness, and intelligent machines, that do not. She creates a new term the “technological nonconscious”, saying
that many aspects of human behaviour have now become integrated with the technological unconscious through the
body/mind, and these newly acquired cognitive activities and actions go unnoticed. The effect that computers have
had on human perception and thinking is immense. The status of the image, in all its contemporary forms, has been
brought into question by the computer’s capacity to reconfigure data, and has problematized our notions of truth and
reality. Reality has collapsed into the world of simulation, where the speed of change transform our very sense of
stability and identity. Metaphorically speaking our flesh has already become data.4

The history and development of human beings suggests that syncretic processes are natural, adaptive and
evolutionary. The reconciliation of paradoxical and incongruous beliefs and actions, thoughts and desires is well
known and seen everywhere. New thinking, systems and forms emerge from hitherto apparently irreconcilable ideas.
These processes, and the desiring body of which they are a part, have developed out of difficulty in understanding
relations, and allow us move directly to an understanding that sheds contradictory or incongruent details to establish
an homogeneous rational construction. This reconciliation of contradictory beliefs and disparate forms of
expression, while a natural part of our mechanism for being in the world, is quite different than that of crossing
boundaries, blurring genres, and dismantling conventions or traditions and well proven methods.

Roland Barthes, in the opening of Pleasure of the Text 5, asks the reader to imagine someone who has abolished
within himself all obstacles, all agendas, all omissions, not by syncretism, but by the abandonment of that old
phantom logical contradiction. To the Project, Barthes’ model, speaking directly to the body, is much more
attractive and desirable than the syncretic process, as it identifies the quest for the unknown, the undetermined,
within, what Barthes would call, a ‘lisible’ and ‘scriptible’ body/world.

The Einstein’s Brain Project takes Barthes’ suggestion at face value and develops its works through a complex
interweaving and intersection of divergent disciplines and often contradictory proceses, not by homogenizing them
but by embracing the illogicality of the contradictions, and embedding them in a structure that drives their
intercommunication.

Katherine Hayles describes this:

“Their work often has a somewhat idiosyncratic range of reference overlying the consistency of their vision, rather
as if a magpie had collected shiny bits from here and there because they attracted her attention and had then woven
them into a nest of breathtaking coherence and careful design.” 6

Ghosts in the Machine (2008) uses this approach to develop a coherent work from a wide range of processes,
systems and references, using algorithms and randomized autonomous processes in order to reference ideas inherent
in Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) and other paranormal exploratory methods, to analyze ways in which
worlds, and bodies within those worlds, are constructed through pareidolia, apophenia, and pattern recognition.7 It
uses a combination of thinking in neuroscience, information visualization, film, popular culture, and art theory as
pataphysical recontextualizing tools.

Ghosts in the Machine problematizes the apparent divisions between subject and object, between animate and
inanimate, between matter and mind, and fact and fiction in order to pose questions about what it is to recognize
pattern and meaning, and to suggest that beyond the habitual recognition of pattern and assigned meaning lies a
world of material potentialities.

Electronic Voice Phenomenon is the recording of noises or voices that have no explicable origin. These recordings
are made when the recorder is alone, or under strictly controlled conditions. Most often white or pink noise is used
as a medium that is acted upon by other electromagnetic forces. This electromagnetic medium produces wave forms
that are, occasionally, like human speech. These voices might be subjective interpretations. Some saying that we
tend to hear voices in random patterns of sound, in the way we recognize forms in random visual patterns. Some,
however, believe that the voices are genuine, and are a conduit to a spirit world.

A CCD camera is turned on but enclosed in a light-tight box. Its input is adjusted with maximum gain and brightness
to reveal the video noise inherent in the system. This noise forms the optical equivalent of audio noise and is used to
provide a medium that can be modified by external forces to produce images and sounds. The video noise is mapped
to audio by using the values in a Quicktime matrix to manipulate a stream of white noise. Voice recognition
software parses the modulated noise and translates any sufficiently voice-like sounds into its nearest vocal
equivalent.

[Figure 1: Sounds of Silence, 2007]

Face tracking algorithms scan each video frame and look for any combination of pixels that forms the basic
characteristics of a human face. These are areas that can be loosely characterized as eyes, nose and mouth with a
sufficient degree of symmetry. When the software finds such a combination the area is zoomed to full screen, its
contrast and brightness adjusted, blurred and desaturated to clarify the found images.

The images produced are only occasionally reminiscent of human faces. More often than not the images produced
are recognized as indeterminate organic forms with volume and space, but fail to resolve themselves into anything
recognizable. But occasionally, images are produced that are strikingly like a face – although in actuality containing
only the barest possibility of being so.

[Figure 2: Ghosts in the Machine, 2008]

 The context and content of this work developed out of a complex assembly of different and sometimes contradictory
ideas, including an examination, and reinterpretation, of Antonioni’s film Blow Up, in which a photographer
searches for meaning in the indistinct enlargements of his unwitting witnessing of a possible murder, the science of
meaning making in the brain, Nigel Kneale’s play The Stone Tape, which suggests that the fabric of the world is a
recording medium capable of playback, and carte du tendre, Madame Scudéry’s map of emotion 8

This work showcases the Project’s interest in perceptual systems that rely on the powerful drive to recognize pattern,
and the oppositional relationship between meaning and the meaningful, and is an example of how the Project’s work
comes out of catalytic enzymatic relationships between ideas and systems that are not necessarily capable of easy
coexistence. The structures that the Project uses are designed only to keep ideas in play long enough to illicit the
maximum friction between ideas and to generate new superheated content through catalysis.

The Project, thus, seeks not to reconcile the contradictory, but, fractured and independent of heterogeneity, find
instead, kinship in Barthes’ ideal reader:

“…who abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions . . . by simple discard of that old specter:
logical contradiction; who mixes every language, even those said to be incompatible; who silently accepts every
charge of illogicality, of incongruity…”9.

1
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Word for World is Forest”, Berkley, New York, 1982
2
Hayles, N. Katherine, “Traumas of Code”, Critical Inquiry (autumn 2006), University of Chicago, Chicago, 2006
3
Thrift, Nigel “Remembering the Technological Unconscious by Foregrounding Knowledges of Position,”
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 1 (2004)
4
See Hayles, N. Katherine, “Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments”, Muse. Vol10
# 2 Spring, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2002
5
Barthes, Roland, “The Pleasure of the Text”, Hill and Wang, New York, 1975
6
Hayles, N. Katherine, op. cit.
7
Pareildolia is a psychological occurrence involving obscure and random catalysts - often sounds or images that are
perceived as being significant. Apophenia is the formulation of connections where there are evidently none.
8
For a comprehensive discussion of the cultural and context surrounding this and other works see Dunning, A., and
Woodrow P., “…a body under the bushes – ghosts in the machine”, in “Mapping the Body: the Bodily Factor in
Memories and Technologies”, University Press of America, Lanham, 2008, in publication.
9
Barthes, Roland., op. cit.

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